In the Penal Colony Analysis

Style and Technique

Kafka’s allegory does not establish a strict, point-for-point parallelism between its literal and abstract levels of meaning, as do Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1599) and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684). The Old Order does not pointedly correspond to the Hebrews’ Old Testament era or the strictures of John Calvin’s Christianity. The deadly purpose of the old regime’s machine violates the Sixth Commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” Nor does the Old Order’s ethic confirm a reciprocal covenant between God and humankind, as the Judeo-Christian Scriptures do.

Still, the Old Order does symbolize all religions that base their authority on transcendent rites and absolute decrees. The machine’s Bed is an altar on which humans are sacrificed to appease the wrathful majesty of a Moloch-like Law. Its creator clearly corresponds to a Lord of Hosts, and the labyrinthine script that guides the machine’s operation stands, not necessarily for the Hebrew Torah recording Judaism’s laws and learning, but for Scripture in general. When the explorer, unable to read the script, describes it as sehr kunstroll—that is, “highly artistic”—he defines himself as a representative modern man who can admire the Bible as literature but refuses to accept it as dogma.

Kafka’s style is realistic in its Swiftian accumulation of plausible detail, stressing a sober sense of documentary...